Tsanko Mladenov

The current stage of the development of Bulgarian literary studies is characterized by the awareness of the ever-growing need to specify the methodology, to build a secure basis for a private and general theoretical interpretation of the artistic facts, in order to be able to cope with all possible deviations from scientific truth, accumulated by both vulgar sociology and subjectivist criticism, which in a number of its manifestations demonstrates its militant anti-scientificity. By the way, there is one aspect in which subjectivism and vulgar sociology converge as much as possible: along with the claim to the indisputability of their assessments, the representatives of both directions showed disregard for the specificity of the work of art. This found expression in the arbitrary interpretation of the text, in a misunderstanding (underestimation and overestimation) of its structural features, and hence - underestimation of the function and semantics of both the whole and its elements.

Two recent international congresses - the Belgrade Congress of the (international) Association for the Comparative History of Literature (ASIL), 1967, and the Prague Sixth International Congress of Slavists, 1968, updated the issues of comparative literary studies, confronted us with the need to clarify our attitude to this science unequivocally. At the Belgrade Congress, a proposal was adopted to prepare a collective work on the comparative history of European literatures, the Literary Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences received powers from ASIL and the obligation to coordinate the work scientifically and administratively, and in Budapest the first volume of a series of collections that examine preliminary problems is already being prepared for publication. At the Prague Congress, the Soviet delegation launched the idea of ​​writing a collective history of Slavic literatures, it seems to me, without achieving much success. Although each of the undertakings is independent in organizational terms, there is an internal connection between them. The success of the first undertaking should prompt us to develop the second: how Slavic literatures will be represented in the comparative history of European literatures will depend on the objectivity and scientific merits of Slavic literary history.